Better to spot a rat than regret him later

Thursday

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, is a clown. He may be a dangerous one, should his rogue, religiously run nation be successful in developing nuclear weapons, but he is a clown nonetheless.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, is a clown. He may be a dangerous one, should his rogue, religiously run nation be successful in developing nuclear weapons, but he is a clown nonetheless.

And Americans very much need to know that, to see him and hear him for what he is so that there can be no doubt in their minds what our nation is up against, not only in Ahmadinejad but in the millions of brainwashed in his part of the world who buy in to such blather. That doesn't happen by shutting the world's wackos up, or by pretending they don't exist.

And so at the risk of voicing an unpopular view, we had no problem with Columbia University giving Ahmadinejad the opportunity to prove himself a clown this week when he was in New York for an address at the United Nations. He did not disappoint,

He again expressed his doubts that the Holocaust ever happened. He insisted that there are no homosexuals in Iran. He likely lied about his nation's nuclear ambitions, saying that "politicians who are after atomic bombs" are "retarded." He tried to distance himself from past comments about his desire to see Israel wiped from the face of the Earth. He came off as wily actor, not wise statesman.

And Columbia got its licks in, with its president dropping the gracious host facade by calling him 'a petty and cruel dictator' and 'either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.' At various points much of the crowd jeered Iran's president. Ahmadinejad is a little man, his arguments even tinier. He is hardly a sympathetic figure, certainly not a "legitimized" one; if anything, he's now less credible.

So why all the fuss and fury? One protester outside the auditorium even passed out flyers mocking Columbia's president, while sarcastically lamenting, "Too bad bin Laden is not available."

Allow us to play devil's advocate and suggest it is too bad. Apparently that critic has forgotten the wisdom of the ancient admonition to "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer." If more Americans were aware of bin Laden and his evil intentions prior to 9-11, perhaps we'd have been more inclined to do something about him before the towers came crashing down.

Indeed, if we Americans bothered to educate ourselves about other nations of the world, and particularly about our adversaries, we'd know that we in the West pay more attention to Ahmadinejad than many of his own countrymen do in an Iran where the ayatollah and other religious leaders hold most of the power, and where he is viewed as something of a bumbler, particularly in pulling his nation out of its Dark Ages economy.

To that point, we don't bother to educate ourselves much about our own nation's ideals, either. Actually, this is less a free-speech issue — the First Amendment only says "Congress shall make no law ..." — than a pragmatic, strategic one. By attempting to hush the likes of Ahmadinejad, we achieve the opposite: We help make him somebody, while providing him ammunition — that we Americans are not what we say we are, that we are hypocrites, deserving of his and his followers' contempt, or worse. We do not win over our enemies, long-term, by force-feeding them doses of their own medicine, but by remaining true to ourselves. What's worse than giving Ahmadinejad a platform? Arguably, not giving him one.

And so it was disappointing to hear President Bush hedge on the matter earlier this week: "When you really think about it, he's the head of a state sponsor of terror ... and yet an institution in our country gives him a chance to express his point of view, which really speaks to the freedoms of the country. I'm not sure I'd have offered the same invitation."

Allow us to respectfully ask: What does the president fear? If our system is right and we know it, we should not shy away from challenges to it. In fact, we should be confident that we will prevail in the marketplace of ideas. We wish more Americans appreciated that.

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